 Hello, everyone. Welcome. So Jane Lindholm turns out did speak to us many years ago. So this is exciting. I think it was maybe before Betsy. Do you remember her? No. This is ancient history. Oh, okay. Oh, well, you know, it happens. So Jane Lindholm is the host executive producer and creator of the but why she launched but why in 2016 and has gone on to become one of the most popular kids podcast in the world. In addition to but why she produces special projects for Vermont public, including a national Merle award winning project commemorating the 20th anniversary of 9 11 until March 2021. She was hosting editor of the award winning Vermont public program. Vermont edition. Remember that. Yes. Jane joined Vermont public in 2007 to expand Vermont edition from a weekly pilot into a flagship daily news magazine. She's been recognized with dozens of regional and national accolades during her time in Vermont. Prior to joining Vermont public. She was the director of the national business program marketplace based in Los Angeles to begin her journalism career at NPR in Washington, D.C. Shortly after graduating from Harvard University with a BA in anthropology. She lives with her family in Addison County and please give a warm welcome to Jane Lindholm. Thank you. What a pleasure it is to be here and I think the last time I was here was like 14 or 15 years ago. I also did a program up in St. Albans, maybe 17 16 years ago now and that was the first talk I ever gave and I was so nervous was the second talk the first one went very badly. And the second one I said, please just bear with me. I'm so nervous and everybody was so kind. It was a program in St. Albans that it made everything easier after that. And, you know, I feel like I don't even have to give a speech now because, yeah, you know, my whole bio. So we're good to go, right? I don't have to say anything, but it's a true pleasure to be here. I'm so honored that you have any interest in hearing what I have to say. And it's such a treat, even 16 17 years on to still be in conversation with Vermonters, which is something I don't take for granted and I never thought when I'm back home would be something that was a possibility for me. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about what motivates me, my history here in Vermont, and play you some audio from some of my favorite interviews and programs over the years. But I'd like to start by asking any of you if you remember the TV show, Frazier, not the reboot which ends up a Frazier, right? You know, it's about a psychiatrist used to hang out at the bar cheers and then he got his own spin off show moved to Seattle started a call in radio show with his dad. Always having this understanding because he was such a snob but deep down he was really good hearted, right? I know it's just a TV show. But at one point, and this was well before any Kelsey Grammar controversy, I had a borderline unhealthy obsession with the show. I say unhealthy, because the reruns aired on cable TV at 11pm. Two episodes back to back, ending at midnight, and I watched that show every single night. I watched 11 seasons worth. And at the time I couldn't quite figure out why am I so compelled to watch this show. I mean, it's funny, but it's not that funny. Certainly not worth staying up until midnight to watch it, especially when I have this new job and I need to be sharp at about 7am. It took me about three months before I started to figure out why I was so drawn to the show. Frazier had left a comfortable home and his friends and moved to his hometown on the other side of the country. I had just moved away from Los Angeles and was now living in my hometown in Middlebury. Frazier was just starting a somewhat bewildering new job hosting a call-in radio show. I was just starting a somewhat bewildering new job hosting a call-in radio show. Frazier was living with his father. I was living with my father. Suddenly it all made sense. I was looking for some sort of shared experience and I was watching ahead in this TV show to reassure myself that all the stress and fear and anxiety that I was feeling was going to result in something successful. But I had made a good decision to move back to Vermont and start up this new show that VPR was just getting going. When VPR, which I know is no longer called VPR, but I imagine there are feelings about that. When the formerly known as VPR hired me, I had never had a single minute of live radio under my belt as a host. I had been working as the director of Marketplace, which is the public radio business show in LA. And I had actually been doing a lot of national reporting on top of my directing duties. But standing in front of a live microphone that was broadcasting what I said as I said it, zero seconds. So this was an incredibly nerve-wracking move and I think Frazier was a kindred, albeit fictional spirit. There were, though, some distinct differences between my life and Frazier's life. Mine was a lot less glamorous. Frazier was trying to keep Eddie the dog off his precious furniture. He was getting in trouble for trafficking in illegal imported Russian caviar. And I can remember one night, not long after I had moved back to Vermont, I was standing in the kitchen of my dad and stepmother's house in Cornwall and I was mixing up this delicious concoction of eucalyptus, lavender, and olive oil. Boy, it sounds like I'd start to a really great recipe, doesn't it? But the recipe was for slathering on my scalp. I rubbed it in. I sat under a shower cap for the next couple of hours, trying not to drip, probably watched an episode of Frazier. I was 28 years old. I was living with my parents and my 10-year-old sister had just given me headlights again. So mine felt like a very different kind of sitcom setup. That moment I nearly packed up and slumped back to the West Coast. But that was more than 16 years ago and clearly I'm still here. And I'm still here because I find my work and this place endlessly fascinating. And I feel so lucky to be able to do what I'm doing where I'm doing it. For 14 years as the host of Vermont Edition, I spent my days learning about issues important to my home state and talking to interesting people about them. Other people, maybe you, listened to those conversations and sometimes called in to participate. And then I got paid, essentially, just to be curious. About eight years ago, I got interested in making a podcast. Vermont Public still didn't have any shows that were made as podcasts, as opposed to shows that were made for broadcast that were then put onto a stream for on-demand listening. So I thought, maybe I could do this and it would be good for me as an adventure and for the station to experiment with. I looked at this landscape of podcasts that was already booming and I realized that I was going to have to go to a part of the podcast landscape that wasn't as full or as popular as some of the others if I wanted to be able to have any traction. And the market for kids programming was totally under saturated. So I figured I could make a show for kids and have a chance of capturing a decent market share. And not only that, but public media has a mission to provide lifelong learning. And we, the radio side at least hasn't been doing it much for kids. So I brainstormed ideas. I was still hosting Vermont Edition at the time, so I knew this had to be something that I could make in about a quarter of my working hours. And I hit on the idea of a show where the kids sent us the questions and then we found interesting people to answer them. Essentially an interview show for kids where they choose the topics. My colleague Melody Baudette immediately offered her support and in 2016 we launched, but why, a podcast for curious kids. As you heard, our show is now one of the most popular kids podcast in the world. We have well over 30 million downloads. We have gotten more than 13,000 questions. And we've heard from kids in all of the US states and territories and more than 90 other countries. And it's the most popular recurring show that Vermont public has ever made by a factor of 10. Thank you. I don't think any of us. Certainly I didn't, but I don't think my managers and superiors thought that that's what would happen. So it's so big and became so big that it became impossible to give both Vermont edition and but why equal attention. And a couple of years ago I stepped down from Vermont edition so that I could focus more fully on but why and some other special projects for the station. And partly so that Vermont public and Vermont edition could have some fresh new voices and new perspectives. And you know it's been pretty amazing. But unless you think I swapped a kind of a challenging job for an easier one. I'm going to play you some of the questions that I now have to grapple with that I never had to grapple with on Vermont edition. And we just have to do some like fancy trickery here with the audio to give me a second. Hello, my name is Jones. I am eight years old and I live in Courtney, Canada. And my question is why are there wizards and witches in this world? Hi, my name is Emma. I'm six years old. I live in St. Paul, Minnesota. And my question is why do we say hmm when you're thinking? Hi, my name is Max. I am 11 years old. I live in Seattle, Washington. And my question is why when someone tells you not to do something it makes you want to do it more. My name is Sarah. I'm five years old. I live in Germany. Why do people cry tears of joy? Hi, my name is Gemma. I'm nine years old and I live in Anita, Massachusetts. My question is who is the first teacher to teach a teacher? My name is Rowan. I'm four years old. I live in Minnesota and my question is why do we say hmm when you're thinking water? I couldn't hear that last one. Why do we say hmm when we stop drinking water? There are a myriad questions that we get from kids, from our young listeners, and they want to know things. They want to know everything. There are a couple of topics we probably won't tackle on the show. We're probably never going to do an episode about whether Santa Claus is real or not. That's when we're going to leave to families. But we have explored some really complex questions over the couple of years, including this one. Hi, my name is Stevie. I live in Marbetos. I am six years old. And my question is why do those sisters and brothers so annoying and goodbye? Hi, my name is Juniper. I am seven years old. I live in Abington, Pennsylvania. And my question is why can little brothers be so annoying? Because I have a little brother and he's really annoying. Why are little brothers and sisters so annoying and equally why are big brothers and sisters so annoying? We've also tackled this one. My name is Khaled. I'm six years old. And I live in United Arab Emirates. My question is why do some people choose to be a bully and some people don't? Yeah, so we've talked about bullying. Why do some people become bullies? Why are some people bullied by other people? And some people never have to worry about bullies. And we've tackled this question that actually, I mean this is a little bit of nepotism, but my son sent this one in shortly after the Russia-Ukraine war started. My name is Dylan and I live in Monkton, Vermont. And my question is why does Russia think they're doing the right thing? That's a pretty tricky one. Why does Russia think they're doing the right thing? It was more than just what's the history of this conflict which we actually were able to describe in some pretty interesting ways as being a little bit like kids sitting at lunch tables and Russia wanting Ukraine to sit at the same lunch table which it had for many centuries but wasn't always kind to Ukraine at that lunch table and Ukraine maybe wanting to sit at a lunch table with other European countries. But that question of why would Russia do this? If you're telling me it's wrong, why do they think it's right? I mean these are really challenging questions that we get from kids and they are not easy to answer. In fact it's much easier to answer questions that adults send in. But if we tell kids, oh that's not an appropriate question or oh you don't have to worry about that, you're too young when they ask about these big topics or about something like debt then we're telling them that there are some things that it's not okay to wonder about or to want to know and that they don't deserve an answer. Our mission on the Y is to celebrate and encourage curiosity in all its forms for our entire life. And luckily a lot of the questions that we get are not that hard they're just pure fun like this one. Hi, my name is Shinche. I am seven years old. I live in November in California. My question is do skunks like the smell of themselves? Do skunks like the smell of themselves? In case you're curious, we actually talked with a Vermont naturalist named Mary Holland for that episode and she had to do some research because it wasn't a question she had ever pondered either. And in her research she discovered a place called the Dragu Institute for the Betterment of Skunks and Skunk Reputation. It's a real place. And she informed us that skunks actually probably do not like the way that they smell. They definitely do not like the way other skunks smell. They will try to roll around, root around if they have a spray on their faces. They try very hard not to be sprayed by another skunk and in fact very rarely get any of their own spray on themselves although maybe on a windy day. And so, you know, I feel like I learned something new in that episode. And then here's another of my absolute favorite questions. I'm six years, six and a half, and I live in Brooklyn, New York, and I'm going to start first grade. And my question is why are jellyfishes made of jelly? Or are they made of jelly? And why do they have stickers? I want to touch it. I love that we get audio from kids. In case you couldn't hear what she was saying, she was saying why are jellyfishes made out of jelly or are they made out of jelly? And why do they have stickers? I want to touch it. And you could just sense that enthusiasm. And maybe some of us have felt the same way but feel a little bit as we get older, like we can't ask those kinds of questions or can't have that kind of enthusiasm. And one of the best things about making But Why is that we have an excuse through kids to investigate those kinds of questions. We don't need a news hook. We don't need something that's happened out there in the world that then allows us to do a recap. We get to go wherever kids' curiosity is. And in fact, it's usually where I am curious to. And then we find out things about the world that we didn't know before. In fact, being curious is basically what I've made a career out of. My job, whether it was hosting Vermont Edition or Now But Why or earlier in my career at NPR and American Public Media has been about following curiosity and asking questions. And I actually have my very first boss to thank for a lot of that. I started my career in 2001 when I got hired to work on a show called Radio Expeditions, which was a co-production of National Geographic and NPR. Carolyn Jensen, who was the executive producer of that show, had found my resume in a pile of intern applications. I had not applied for an internship at NPR, but I had at one point had a conversation. I knew someone who knew someone who knew someone whose dad knew someone who was the CEO of NPR. And I had this conversation on the phone with him, and then I sent him my resume for the college senior, so it was mostly waitressing and summer camp work. And I think he very kindly had this conversation and then put my resume in a pile to gather dust, which was entirely appropriate. But Carolyn Jensen found it, and she thought I looked like an appealing candidate. And she liked my mix of travel. I had lived in both South America and East Africa by then in study abroad programs in preschool and college. And I had studied anthropology, and she thought that was a good match for the show that she made. And so she called the house, because everybody still had house phones. I still do have a house phone. Had to offer me a job. And she was very kind to me, because I had not applied for a job, but also because I had no idea what I was going to do with my life at the time. And I was in this very sort of bewildering spot. I had just graduated from college, and I had gone off to write for Let's Go Travel Guides, which was a student production at Harvard University. And so I was a writer for the Let's Go Spain guide. And I had left just three days after graduation, and two days later, while I was on that trip, I got word that one of my very closest friends, a fellow Let's Go writer named Haley Surty, had been killed in a bus accident in Peru writing for Let's Go. I was devastated. All of the writers who were on assignment were offered a chance to keep writing on location where we were or to cancel our contracts and come home. I had really wanted to do this adventure in Spain, but it was where Haley had gone to study abroad, and she had gone to Peru to travel in some of the places where I had gone during my study abroad semester. And I just couldn't be in these places that reminded me of her. And I wanted to see her one more time, see her family, see my family. So I left the book to someone else, and I went to Pittsburgh to say goodbye to Haley, and then I came home to Vermont with no job and no idea what I was going to do to make enough money to survive. So when Carolyn called and left a message with my stepmother, I actually thought that it was an ill-advised attempt at a pick-me-up by a friend who knew I was down in the dumps and loved NPR, and I almost didn't call that. But it was real, and Carolyn offered me an internship, and I said, yes, I love an internship. She said, well, we can't pay you. And I said, oh, but I can't do it. And she said, OK, we can pay you. Not much. I still waitress, but she made it possible for me to go to DC and start this internship and work on this amazing show called Radio Expeditions. The point of Radio Expeditions was to go out with explorers and adventurers and scientists around the world and capture audio and then take it back and spend weeks crafting a sound-rich narrative that they could then air on Morning Edition. I did not get to travel with the team to these amazing locations, but I did get to listen to 36, 48, 72 hours of sound that they would bring back with them. My job as the intern was to transcribe this sound. And to give you a taste of what that means, let me take you to their trip to the Central African Republic where they were following researchers who were learning about how elephants communicate. Elephants have these very low frequency calls that they can make back and forth to one another over a distance of a mile or more. And the scientists were studying what these calls mean and how elephants talk. So my job was to transcribe hours and hours of elephant sounds and try to create a written transcript that would help Carolyn and her husband, Alex Chadwick, the regular reporter of the segment, pick which sounds to use in their story. This is what a bunch of elephant sounds sound like when you're trying to transcribe them. That was 46 seconds. I had to do this for hours. And my job was to write things in the transcript like low grumble, loud rumble, long emphatic bone. And I did this for weeks. It was both amazing and very tedious, hilarious, sometimes heartwarming, sometimes very confusing. But what it was most of all was a lesson in the power of sound and how when you pair it with really good writing you can bring a story to life for your listeners. You can put them inside the scene, make them feel like they are there with those elephants. And later on I could use that to help people feel like they were invested in conversations about very charged issues, including things like the F-35 debate. And when you can add empathy to the mix in your writing or your interviewing, you can help your audience understand, for example, the grief of a parent who had lost a child to the opioid overdose epidemic. And how that human experience connects to policy and politics. That very first radio job I have, transcribing the sounds of elephants calling to one another across the distance, also give me a lesson in what it's like to have a mentor and a boss who believes in you. And in many ways I owe my career to Carolyn Jensen, who became a friend. She died in 2010, but I hope that in some way I am carrying her legacy. And when I thought about but why and creating but why, it was with that experience in mind, that idea that you could take people places and that you, the creator, would have this amazing career helping other people see and understand the world. And so, back in 2007, when I got the chance to host my own show, Vermont Edition was just getting off the ground, I also took those lessons to heart. The first few months I was here in the summer of 2007, I was getting up to speed on how to host, because remember, not one minute of live radio. And I was getting some vocal training, doing research on the local politics and culture. I hadn't lived here in many years full time. And so I was going around the state to reacquaint myself with Vermont and Vermonters. And then we were putting some of those interviews on all things considered in Morning Edition until Vermont Edition got started. And one of the very first interviews that I got to do before anybody knew who I was, was with Vermont's newly installed poet laureate, Ruth Stone, who lived right in my hometown of Middlebury. So I tried to set up this interview, and one of her daughters was the one I was communicating with, and she said to me almost apologetically, well, my mom can't come to the station. You're going to need to do it in her house. She doesn't get around very well, and she's mostly blind. That's no problem, I said. So I went to Ruth's house, and she was waiting with her daughter, Marcia, who I'd been talking with, and because this is Vermont, it turns out Marcia had been my guidance counselor in kindergarten at Mary Hogan. So I showed up totally agreeing, not really knowing what to expect or how to do this thing that we call an interview. And I have to say it got off to a really inauspicious start. They tell you when you're making radio to just start recording and save all of your audio because you never know what you'll get. And we didn't put this on the air, we just took some of the tape from when we sat down to start this interview. We were trying to sit down, I should say, and Marcia was helping Ruth get settled, and I was just about ready to start interviewing her when this happened. Marcia, this thing has gone dead. The cat went out. Oh no. Oh Marcia. She can't hear. She can't hear. She's running away from me. I'm not going to chase her. Marcia, she can't hear. All right, let me put this microphone in front of you. I can't hear, darling. Let me get it in. So in case you couldn't hear exactly what was happening there, we now have a deaf cat who has escaped, a daughter who's being yelled at, and an interview subject whose hearing aid has failed. My first interview was not going well, but Marcia got Ruth another hearing aid with a new battery, and the cat was fine, and we moved on, and I was 100% charmed by Ruth Stone. To this day, it's one of my favorite interview moments. She's just started singing. Ruth at the time was really struggling with her memory, and there were a lot of questions that she struggled to answer, couldn't remember back in time, as well as she used to be, and sometimes thought time periods confused the past and the present, as I think is totally natural. She was a non-agenarian, but she all of a sudden remembered this moment and said, have you heard this song and started singing it? And I'm going to play you, maybe I won't play you the whole song, but I'll play you a minute of it, because it was wonderful to hear this song that I had never heard that despite the challenges she was having with memory, Ruth could remember word for word. I'd say I've lost 99% of what's come to me, and that one I have three daughters. Did I sing that one just now? No, would you like to sing that? I'll sing it to you. I have three daughters like green gauge plums. They sat all day sucking their thumbs and more the pity they cried all day. Why doesn't our mother's brown hair turn gray? I have three daughters like three cherries. They sat at the window, the boys to please, and they couldn't wait for their mother to grow old. Why doesn't our mother's brown hair turn to snow? I have three daughters in the apple trees. They're my mother and daddy with three young lovers to take them away from me. I have three daughters like green gauge plums sitting all day and sighing all day and sucking their thumbs. Sing a mama won't you fetch and carry and daddy won't you let us marry. Singing sprinkle snow down on mama's hair and lordy give us our share. Our share of what? That's a funny one. I just loved hearing her sing that song and you get these moments when you have a show like mine and I did play you the whole two minutes but we're going to call it host prerogative. I've never done an interview at this point and here's this brilliant woman singing into my microphone and that was really, I think, the first moment that I realized oh, people will open up to you. Microphones are intimidating but they're also freeing. They're freeing for the people who are asking questions that maybe they've never been asked before and they are freeing for the interviewer who gets to ask questions that perhaps you wouldn't even ask of your own family members. There are certainly ways to do that very, very wrong too but you'd think somebody's going to clam up on a microphone and instead it often makes them open up instead. It's a real privilege and it's an honor to get to hear people's remarkable stories and my previous job start statewide conversations around ideas that are sparked by those stories. I remember one conversation we did on Vermont edition there was a woman I knew who told me that after many months of trying to get pregnant and then learning that there was no hospital in Vermont that would do IVF treatments for her because she had already turned 40 the overwhelming feeling she had was isolation and grief and it wasn't so much her story that she wanted told it was the pain and sadness that she felt and the feeling that she had to hide all of this grief from her coworkers and acquaintances because she didn't have a baby and she felt at the time you don't talk about these things, you don't talk about failed pregnancies, you don't talk about the grief that you have over something that isn't even there but she told me about it and we did a show and we asked people to write in or call in to talk about their emotions or their experiences with infertility and to share what they wanted people to know about how to help and I don't pretend that that lessened anyone's grief significantly but there are moments where if you're able to come together with other people who are having similar experiences even if you don't see them or know them or ever get to talk to them again it can at least for a little bit of time help lessen that isolation we planned an episode segment several years ago now about what was then a still relatively newish drug treatment gaining in popularity called buprenorphine it's sometimes now better known as suboxone and it's used to treat opioid use disorder we thought at the time that we would do 20 minutes on it with some doctors who could tell us how it works but that beyond that we had much interest in hearing about it what we didn't account for was the number of people who were living with addiction were recovering from addiction to opioids who wanted to call in to talk about that experience and they wanted to talk about their experiences in active addiction they wanted to talk about treatment protocol they wanted to talk about a lack of access to treatment we wound up dropping the other two segments that we had planned and we went the full hour just listening to people's powerful stories of loss and renewal and now of course perhaps a decade on we see that the opioid epidemic continues to grow and has devastated so many families in Vermont and beyond it's more than a decade now but still very present in my mind when Tropical Storm Irene hit Vermont at the time I think BPR was a little slow on the uptake and didn't realize what this storm was going to be like but once we saw how devastating the damage was and how many people were unable to communicate with their loved ones or to find information using things like the internet we threw out our normal format of one hour at noon and we broadcast at seven we went live on Vermont edition for an hour and a half or two hours every day that first week after the storm and then instead of rebroadcasting we went live again at 7pm and the things people told us were heartbreaking and inspiring sometimes it was just people saying I need to get to a doctor's appointment and route 4 is closed do you know how I can get there I don't have the internet and Ross Snead who was our news director at the time got the name Tom Tom because he would be in the studio and he would just look it up and he was like a personal GPS for Vermonters and he'd say oh I've got a route for you here's how you're going to get to route 4 because you can't use this road but you can use this road and then he would say it slowly so the caller could write it down and then sometimes somebody else would call in five minutes later and say well I'm actually headed to Dartmouth Hitchcock too if you can be at this intersection at 9am I can give you a ride people would call in and express concern because they hadn't heard from their uncle since the storm and the phone lines were down and then half an hour later we'd get an email from someone who said yeah Joe's okay I saw him out in his front yard I'll tell him you're worried one evening at first week there was a call for animal feed the pearly cows and self-royal fin were out of food and they were in desperate need by the next morning people were showing up with hay and pellets one woman wrote to us after things had settled down a little bit and said you know every day at noon during that week my kids and my dog and I would get in our car and roll down the windows and sit there and listen to your broadcast it was the only contact we had with the regular world until our roads were repaired and it was our lifeline I say this with all sincerity it is a remarkable privilege to be the conduit of this kind of information and to have people trust us trust me with their questions their concerns their stories and now their children although I actually have to admit not everybody trusts me or opens up like Rootstone did several years now but I think it's still going to be on my tombstone some day that I'm the one Bernie Sanders hung up on people still ask me about it we were doing an interview about a letter that the senator had sent out after the shooting of congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords the Sanders team had released a letter condemning the attack as many senators had but attached to the end of this letter was a fundraising message asking people to give to his reelection campaign I think you can imagine I did not go over well Senator Sanders had initially refused to do any interviews about it and my personal take on it was that this was a really unfortunate gap that had just missed the the overseers at some point this was something that was attached to every email and somebody else had written it and somebody else had approved it and they just hadn't seen that this was at the end and was really inappropriate but there was a lot of mounting pressure and complaints and so he agreed to come on Vermont edition and I interviewed him in a format that we like to call live to tape even though nobody uses tape anymore so that's when we do an interview as if it's live because for example you're trying to fit it into a 5 minute 27 seconds walk and you aren't planning to do any editing or you don't have time to do any editing before the broadcast and as is the case with many political issues Senator Sanders had an agenda and so did I and they didn't quite match up he wanted to talk about how Republicans were skewering on this letter and that if I just read the letter I would realize what he had been trying to say what I wanted to talk about was what he was trying to say because I found it very troubling not the fundraising part I thought that was tone deaf but understandable he wanted to talk about something else he had ascribed a motive to the shooter in that email and he had been talking about Senator Sanders had been talking about a sort of far right wing dangerous ideology he said it was an assault on liberal viewpoints but at that point when his letter came out we didn't know the motive of the shooter it wasn't public information so I wanted to ask Senator Sanders about that aspect of his letter but he did not like the questioning so he was very polite the whole time he hung up on me but this was a live to tape interview so we played the whole thing including the hang up my hunch is that he got some feedback from his staff after that was played because his next appearance on Vermont edition with me and the host here came a few months later and it was in person in the studio and he was remarkably polite and friendly to me which he hasn't always been at one point in the live interview I guess I accused him of being stride in his viewpoints and Senator Sanders leaned forward and said softly into the microphone I didn't know dang I'm a gentle soul as I mentioned when I first got started on Vermont edition I was 28 and I was unknown to Vermont's political circles and I think a 28 year old woman can appear rather unthreatened this turned out to be a position I could use to my advantage when people in power underestimated my capability I would ask a fairly easy question and smile gently and then follow up with a hardball they were not expecting work like a charm doesn't work anymore I am now a grizzled old timer but I do still employ some of the same tactics there's a friend of mine who listened to Vermont edition for years and said he would wait until the sound of my voice the tone started to go up once it hit an octave above where I normally talk he said that's when I was going for the jugular he would say it was something like you're having taxpayers pay for this junket to China because you say your presence will help the investors be word into the project but Governor I'm trying to care who you are of course we all need a break from politics sometimes and if you listen to the show when I was hosting you could probably tell that I really, really love animals I used to watch the show Wild America when I was a kid and I just desperately wanted to be the host Marty Staufer he got to narrate these documentaries for kids and it was so cool I do not have the beard that he had but I still wish that I could do that job or David Attenborough's job so I think Vermont Fish and Wildlife knew this they definitely had my number and they would say every quarter or so hey we're going to go out and do some work with rattlesnakes want to come? Yes I did we're going to go check on hibernating bears and do some work with them to see how they're tolerating wind power development do you want to come? Yes I do so I got to go to all of these wonderful things including doing a lot of work with white nose syndrome in bats and I was not, certainly not the first there were some reporters in New York who first broke this story but I got to go pretty early on in the white nose epidemic and report on this amazing and devastating phenomenon I'm going to skip some of the audio so you have time for questions but I got to go first to this cave called Aeolus Cave in southern Vermont and we walked into the cave in February when bats are supposed to be hibernating and all of these bats were flying out and in fact they were sort of dipping close to us and none of their normal defenses seemed to be working and then they would walk onto the ground and die but then if you live in a place and work in a place for long enough you get to report on what happens next and while white nose syndrome continues to challenge bat populations throughout much of the country there are signs of hope a couple years ago I went to a summer area for bats in Saltbury to cover a bridge that has actually since burned down but that population of bats had this amazing strength and so scientists in Vermont have been trying to figure out what do these bats have that others don't and last summer I got to go report on a group of federally endangered Indiana bats in the Champlain Valley that have survived and the population has grown and they had no idea that there were this many bats roosting in bat houses Indiana bats were never known to roost in houses and it's actually a spot where I like to take my dog to walk and so my kids and I have gone out in the summertime at dusk and done our own citizen science bat housing project to see how many bats fly out and yes I did get to also go see rattlesnakes I was actually pregnant with my first child but hadn't told anybody including my parents my husband did know and we got out of the truck there are two very small rattlesnake populations in Vermont they're both in northern Rutland County and the Fish and Wildlife scientist I was with said look here's a laminated card it tells you all of the hospitals within a hundred mile radius where there's anti-venom and I was like well why are you showing me he's like well in case I'm the one who gets bitten and I'm the capacitive and at that moment I was like I'm pregnant so they got to know before anybody else in my family did I have been so lucky to have the life and career that I have and to make it in Vermont where people are both very kind and generous but also full journalists and our media sources to such a high standard you all set a very high bar and I'm grateful that at my best you put your trust in me to share your lives and stories to grapple with some of the biggest issues we face as communities and have conversations and I want to thank you for that because 16 years in I'm not tired of it there are so many stories to tell and so many ideas to explore and I'm just grateful that people are willing to let me do that here and willing to listen to me today thank you hello oh that was great you are such fun we love you I should have turned around any questions over here thank you very much I know that many people in this room remember our link letter and the children kids say the darkest thing so I was thinking about that and it seems like in that situation they were looking at children to kind of amuse us and to say things that were unexpected and funny and what you're doing is to really identify kids as curious and intelligent absolutely yeah thank you for picking up on that we think kids deserve answers as much as adults do and they deserve them not in a patronizing way not talking down to kids or again saying things like oh don't worry about that kids deserve to get answers just maybe need them in a different vocabulary or they need the vocabulary explained for kids in whatever way whether they were teachers or media professionals or I wish there was more of this on YouTube that you can help kids feel empowered to be empathetic, thoughtful inquiring people as they grow up we usually have a very curious there we go thank you very much very interesting life you lead I would say anyway so my question has to do with in broad stroke right now auditory in contrast to visual early learning and uptake and being entertained and such like I'm somewhat raising this question out of my own impression that given as old as I am TV didn't come along for the first 10 or so years and so I was very reliant on the radio and I find through the years it's my steady Freddy friend their radio and there may be multiple reasons for that but one may be exposure early and dependence on that channel so to speak for interactive and later the visual came on strong and screens now are all the rage so that's my preface I don't know if you have anything to add to say on that matter and the other is if I'm right in that kind of assumption any other multifactorial kind of reasons you could begin to join in this but I am interested in especially the developmental dependence on auditory in contrast to visual and the ways in which kids today are exposed to visual from the cradle and the implications of that for the future radio there are implications on that for the future of how we interact and how kids are growing up maybe in generations today beyond just the visual this idea of not having to communicate face to face and in many cases not even having to talk on the phone with one another we can do it through text or chat online so I think we're already seeing that and I think we're seeing that even in adults not just kids even we I think are changing our behaviors around how much time we spend with screens and a lot of the kids today are getting their ideas about screens from us we may say you have half an hour of screen time today and yet there we are on the couch with our cell phones for four hours and maybe we can say we're reading the New York Times but they don't know that I think there are a couple, first of all I think audio isn't going to go away it's changing and certainly the market for it and how a public radio station can make money is changing but people still want audio we don't have cars we still want to listen to something when we're in our cars we have kids who need non-screen time and a lot of parents are really looking for things that are non-screen time we actually put but why episodes on YouTube with no visuals because we know that people actually sometimes pick it up on YouTube and kids if given the chance will stare at that screen with no moving visual for the entire 25 minutes they are so we do sometimes put it there but we know from surveys that a lot of families listen to our episodes in the car and then have conversations about them on their way to and from school and this makes me feel a little bit bad but a lot of them put it on for their kids at bedtime I don't know whether I'm really boring or I would like to think it excites the kids before bedtime and we still have lots of conversations but I think we're still often all of us are looking for that kind of less stimulating audio and there are plenty of kids podcasts out there now and kids shows that give them a ton of stimulation and that's just not our style but given that we're one of the top 20 kids podcasts in the world I think there is some evidence that that is still appealing to people to have a calm voice non-video just something to relax with and so we're not going to reach everybody but the kids families and classrooms that do want that kind of thing have us and then we're not immune to the video world we do make videos now too and we just started a series for schools that incorporates 10 5 minute videos about things that are happening in the New England landscape each month that will give them an insight maybe that they don't see in their own lives like really really microscopic mushrooms or an animation of the wing structure of a rafter that can soar and then we pair that with curriculum and activities for them to do and go outside and do so I think there's it's shrinking but I think there's still a need for audio and for educational entertaining less stimulating maybe more mentally stimulating I'd like to think Thank you You said you were going to be working on special projects and I just wondered what you have been working on or what you're going to be working on in terms of a special project other than the how so the first really big special project that I worked on after I left Vermont edition was the 9-11 Remembrance Project and Melody Bodette who works on but why with me and I did that and we spent about four months collecting 70 stories from people with Vermont connections and it was multimedia so some of them sent photographs, some of them sent poems a couple sent videos, a lot of people recorded themselves and then we built a website where it was an interactive way for people to go in and sort of let these experiences slide over them and you know it seemed on the face of it like something that maybe shouldn't have taken that long and it turns out it took a ton of work because while our voices were not in it taking your voice out of the process as a reporter is really hard and it takes a lot of time to work with people so it was great to be able to have that time to do that Melody and I also worked with the Vermont page program, the pages who are middle schoolers who work in the state house and we did page stories where they wrote their own stories and then recorded them for radio and only the ones who wanted to but so now they have these stories if they should ever decide to go into politics or public media I also worked on documentary of Patrick Leahy that aired the day he retired in January and we did and that was a TV documentary and we did a couple of interviews with him in Vermont and Washington DC and put together a sort of a small form interview piece with him and then this past year the special project has been working on school curriculum and videos and I was hoping to expand that and do a national school based series for kids about climate change because we know that science education is really especially elementary school teachers are finding it challenging to have the time and the resources to teach science well and particularly the science of climate change and so we were hoping we could do that and bring that into schools and we didn't get funding for it so right now I'm a little bit out of crossroads I'm actually watching the morning show now it's much like Frasier I'm like why am I so obsessed with this kind of silly show about morning TV broadcasters and I think maybe it's because they are at a career crossroads at many points in that show and I think maybe I am too so give me three months and I'll tell you where I am okay so our last question comes from a zoom how do you reach out to children through school to their parents who lists yeah how do I reach out to kids you know when we started we seeded a few of our questions so we said to our friends and friends of friends and anybody we knew on social media could you please have your seven year old send us a question and we thought maybe we won't get anybody else to write in and then it wound up being word of mouth and the popularity of the show grew so quickly that we don't do any we don't have to do any specific outreach to kids they come to us so we say in every episode you know record your question have an adult help you record it and we get too many questions now and we kind of try to downplay that aspect of it because it's really hard to disappoint 12,000 kids we can only play 1,000 questions and then we do struggle because we'll do a 25 minute episode and we'll have 75 questions about the same topic you put that in without pouring people to death but each kid wants to hear their own voice and should get to hear their own voice so yeah and now we're working on specific outreach to specific demographic groups that perhaps don't don't have adults who are necessarily going to put but why in front of them so are there underrepresented or underserved populations of kids that we could help serve that's part of the mission of Vermont Public and part of the mission of public television in particular and so we're really working hard to push Vermont Public on we need to be better in these areas and we need to be providing high quality, trustworthy back based entertainment for kids and so that's what we're working on at the moment thank you